A Simple Linux Based Network Audio Appliance<\/h2>\n
<\/center> Working mostly in front of a PC, I appreciate the ease of Recently, I got Yeo’s USB-SPDIF converter. Unlike most PC sound cards A normal desktop PC is usually quite bulky, noisy and ugly, and it A while ago, I got to play with such a device, the Norhtec I looked at various Linux mini distros to go with this. Some didn’t Puppy Linux is by design a desktop system, however we don’t need the If you are reading this article, most likely you already got your music You The proposed system uses mpd<\/a> \n \n<\/p>\n Honestly, this is not for the impatient. You need Yeo’s USB-SPDIF converter, a CF card reader and a 1GB CF card. The player software is mpd<\/a>, With such a low speed CPU and so little RAM, it’s no fun compiling the \nSubstitute your path to the archive, of course. Edit the file \/etc\/ld.so.conf<\/span> \nThen run the command<\/p>\n \nYou will need to edit \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.local<\/span> Edit the file \/etc\/profile<\/span> \nThis will prevent the GUI from starting next time. If the GUI is After this is all done, use the GUI to reboot the system. That way, all To play music, you need a front end program<\/a>
\n
\nby Ole Schüsseler<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span>![\"Monica2,](\"http:\/\/diyparadise.com\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/stories\/img\/mcn_small2.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhy?<\/h2>\n
\nselecting music from my library without having to look for CDs and
\nhandling them. This comfortable listening is something I missed in my
\nmain system where I need to leave my seat every time I want to change
\nthe media. Also, my player often fails on CDR media, which is just
\nannoying. Of course I could just buy a Squeezebox, but I’d like to DIY
\nbetter.<\/p>\n
\nor onboard SPDIF interfaces, it outputs audio data with 44.1kHz
\nsampling rate, which means there is no resampling of the original. What
\nit outputs is just the same as any CD player, provided a lossless
\nstorage format such as FLAC is used.<\/p>\n
\nneeds other peripherals to work as well. Not a suitable source device
\nfor a listening room, I’d say. However, there are mini PCs available
\nthat have no moving parts at all. These are often intended as
\ncontrol\/monitoring devices for industrial applications, or thin
\nclients. Accordingly, CPU and memory specs are typically very low.<\/p>\n
\nMicroClient Jr.<\/a>
\nIt boots from a Compact Flash card and has a 200MHz SOC (system
\non chip) CPU and 128MB RAM. That’s all there is, and it’s not
\nupgradeable. However, it has three USB ports and a LAN interface built
\nin. It can also be ordered with a built-in WLAN in addition. Power
\nsupply is a small wall wart SMPS, as the box consumes only about 15W.
\nIt also has an onboard audio chip, but it’s not suitable for
\nhigh end audio.<\/p>\n
\neven boot, some were lacking features, finally I used Puppy Linux<\/a>.
\nIt is very easy to install on any media, and it runs on UnionFS – it
\nbasically consists of two file systems, one read-only off the flash
\ndisk, and a superimposed one in RAM. Changes to the filesystem are
\nstored in RAM while the system is up, and they are written back to the
\nflash disk when the system shuts down. For an appliance that normally
\ndoesn’t store any data on the local disk this is good, because it’s
\npossible to just switch off the power without damaging anything. Nobody
\nwants to shut down a CD player before turning off, right?<\/p>\n
\nGUI for this application. It comes in handy while setting up the
\nsystem, though.<\/p>\nHow It Works<\/h2>\n
\non your PC as MP3, Ogg or FLAC or similar. You play music
\nusing your PC sound card or perhaps Yeo’s USB-SPDIF converter with the
\nplayer program of your choice. What I’m suggesting here is almost the
\nsame, except that the playback program resides on a mini PC, away from
\nyour desktop, and it accesses your music files over your LAN through
\nshared folders on your PC. The user frontend of the playback program is
\nindependent of either machines. The program listens for control
\ncommands over the LAN, so you can control the playback from anywhere
\nyou like.<\/p>\n
\ndon’t have to use the Norhtec PC. Any other will do, provided it has at
\nleast the same hardware specs. I like it because it doesn’t make any
\nnoise, looks nice and because it’s really cheap. It’s also quite heat
\ntolerant, and I have never seen it crashing.<\/p>\n
\nas playback software on the mini PC. So to say, it turns any PC into an audio playback
\ndevice with network remote control. It handles only audio files, not streams
\nlike internet radio. Some of the frontends<\/a>
\nthat are available for mpd are web based, so if you run a web server
\nwith PHP support on your desktop PC, you can use one of these and then
\nremote control mpd using any other PC in your LAN that has a web
\nbrowser – for example, your PDA with wireless support.<\/p>\nPreparing the System<\/h2>\n
\nMany things can and will go wrong. With electronics, it means sparks,
\nsmoke, loss of money. With computers and networks, it means
\nfrustration, aggression, loss of time. But unlike a burnt circuit, you
\ncan always reformat. And remember, it’s DIY.<\/p>\n
\nPossibly 512MB are enough, too. Download the distro ISO file from their
\ndownload page and burn it on a CD. I used puppy-2.14-seamonkey-fulldrivers.iso<\/a>.
\nFollow the instructions on their site on how to flash the system to
\nyour CF card, there is a program in the distro that does just that.
\nPlug the CF card into your mini PC and boot. The initial setup is well
\ndocumented on the Puppy Linux web site, so I won’t go into details
\nhere. You should assign a fixed IP address, do not use DHCP. Once you
\nhave configured everything to match your network environment, go on
\nreading.<\/p>\n
\nthe Music Player Daemon. It is using several libraries: libidtag<\/a>, libmad<\/a>, libogg<\/a>, libvorbis<\/a>
\nand flac<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nrequired libraries and programs by yourself. Therefore, I have put
\ntogether an archive with everything you need here<\/a>
\n. Download this to your running Puppylinux, open a terminal window and
\nunpack the archive:<\/p>\n
\ntar xvzf
\n\/root\/streaming_audio_puppylinux.tgz<\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\nand make sure that the first line reads:<\/p>\n
\nand \/etc\/mpd.conf<\/span>
\nto reflect your setup. In particular, you need to replace the name of
\nyour desktop or server system where your music files are, in the
\nexample it’s YOURDESKTOP<\/span>.
\nYour desktop or server should offer a public read-only share named music<\/span> . It can
\ncontain FLAC, MP3 or Ogg files and folders.<\/p>\n
\nand comment out the line that reads<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\nrunning while playing music, you will likely experience dropouts due to
\nCPU overload.<\/p>\n
\nyour changes will be written to flash. Assuming you configured the LAN
\nproperly and the USB-SPDIF converter is plugged in, it should mount the
\nmusic share, start mpd, and listen on the LAN for commands.<\/p>\nOperation<\/h2>\n
\nthat can talk to mpd. These typically run on your desktop PC or server,
\nnot on the mini PC. In my case, I installed Apache and PHP on my
\ndesktop PC and use phpMp2<\/a>.
\nThis means that you can access it through your LAN from any other PC in
\nyour place using a web browser. I have a wireless LAN at home and a
\nWLAN capable PDA, so I can select songs from my library using my PDA in
\nthe listening room, while the noisy desktop PC is running in my office
\nroom.<\/p>\n